In America

Sickness In the N.Y.P.D.

By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 11, 1996

One April morning in 1973 a veteran police officer named Thomas Shea pulled his service revolver and blew away a young black boy on a street in Jamaica, Queens. He shot the kid in the back. There was no chance of survival. Afterward, no one could figure out why the officer had done it. There was no reason for the shooting, no threat to Officer Shea of any kind. The boy's name was Clifford Glover and he was 10 years old.

Officer Shea was charged with murder but of course he was acquitted.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1976 an officer named Robert Torsney fired a bullet into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, outside a housing project in Brooklyn. No one could figure that one out, either. Officer Torsney would later claim he had been afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably, had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it.

The ''epilepsy'' defense worked. Officer Torsney was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing.

The bridge between those outlandish cases of the 1970's and Monday's demoralizing acquittal of Police Officer Francis X. Livoti in the killing of Anthony Baez is littered with the bodies of New Yorkers of all ages whose lives were summarily and unjustly taken by New York City cops who managed in virtually every instance to beat the rap.

Eleanor Bumpurs is on that bridge, and Anibal Carasquillo. Ms. Bumpurs was the overweight, arthritic, emotionally disturbed 66-year-old woman who was shotgunned to death by police who broke into her apartment in a case that had to do with unpaid rent. Ms. Bumpurs, confused and counseled by her family never to let strangers into the apartment, picked up a carving knife when the cops burst in. That was the end of her.

Mr. Carasquillo, 21, was shot to death on a Brooklyn street by a police officer in January 1995. The worst the police could say about Mr. Carasquillo, who was unarmed, was that he had been peering into the windows of parked cars. There is reason to doubt the police on even that point inasmuch as they also said he had been shot in the chest. It turned out he had been shot in the back.

The case went before a grand jury but no indictment was returned.

There are many, many similar cases. Last summer I visited the grieving family of Nathaniel Gaines Jr., a 25-year-old Navy veteran of the gulf war who was shot to death by a police officer on a subway platform in the Bronx on the Fourth of July. Mr. Gaines was unarmed and had no police record. The shooting was inexplicable.

Said Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, ''There does not seem to be any reason for it.''

The Mayor apologized to the Gaines family. The police officer, Paolo Colecchia, was indicted for manslaughter. But the apology and the indictment were like whispers in a hurricane. Nothing has changed. The killings continue because no one has stepped forward to make it clear to the sadists and the sociopaths and the raging, howling racists in the Police Department that their murderous behavior will not be tolerated.

Instead, the entire political and criminal justice establishment has gone out of its way to send the opposite message: Once you button up that uniform and strap on that sidearm you can brutalize certain types of people with impunity.

Officer Livoti, acquitted of choking Mr. Baez to death in a confrontation over a touch football game, had been the focus of 14 prior civilian complaints, only one of which was substantiated. In that one, still pending, he is accused of slapping and choking a 16-year-old boy who allegedly had ridden a go-cart recklessly. That complaint was made by the boy's mother in September 1993 but was not acted upon until after Mr. Baez was killed in December 1994.

In recent years the department has gotten more brutal, not less, with civilian complaints up from 977 in 1987 to more than 2,000 in 1994, according to a study by Amnesty International. The study said the amount of money paid to complainants in settlements or judgments in police abuse cases had also risen, from $13.5 million in 1992 to more than $24 million in 1994.

No one wants to pay much attention, but there is an awful sickness coursing through the N.Y.P.D., the only city agency that tolerates murder.